


I Want it All (but All of it Ain't Gold)

by gaywrongs



Category: LOONA (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bands, Angst, F/F, Pining, Unrequited Love, btw escaping eden is my band name so if anyone steals it, for fucksticks, im going to ur concert and exposing that u got it from a loona fanfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-03-05 21:43:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18837358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaywrongs/pseuds/gaywrongs
Summary: She knew nothing more beautiful than Jungeun, but there was no meaning in spending a lifetime in love with a song of silence.So maybe Jiwoo was a romantic.Maybe because she had to be.(Or: Jiwoo loves music. Escaping Eden is a band with a girl named Soul and a piece of Jungeun’s heart.)





	I Want it All (but All of it Ain't Gold)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sansrival](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sansrival/gifts).



> title from EDEN's song Circles (Escaping Eden's vibe in this is all of his music btw he's like loona -- has no bad songs). dedicated to @sansrival for enabling my poor half braincell usage! I wrote a quarter of this while drunk and the rest during an all-nighter, so forgive me

So maybe Jiwoo was a romantic.

Maybe she liked the way people interacted with little hints of love peeking behind all their facades like flowers through sidewalk cracks. Maybe she liked the idea of finding that one person you were meant to grow with in this life and living out your days together. Maybe she liked watching the sun set beneath the ocean line and breathing in the gentle wind and singing songs about the beauty of it all.

So maybe Jiwoo didn’t subscribe to the nihilistic, ironic humor of everyone else her age.

Because what was life without a bit of romanticization? Boring. Or perhaps less disappointing.

Jiwoo was a romantic.

Jungeun wasn’t.

When Jiwoo fell in love, she fell hard and fast. When Jungeun fell in love — well. That was the thing, wasn’t it? Jungeun never fell in love. At least, not since Jinsol, not since loud laughs and shy smiles and premature promises of forever suddenly disappeared into a dark sunset.

Jiwoo wrote a song once, about a red-stained soul who fell so hard she couldn’t find her way to her feet again. The sky had flipped, and the lost soul wandered away from the sun’s pleading rays of warmth.

She scratched the notes out, because it was not her song to sing.

Instead, she sang of her own loves. These came easy enough; she drew inspiration from all corners of her life, because Jiwoo knew that love could always be found if you just allowed yourself to look.

One song was about the way the leaves looked in the early morning light on the walk to school. One was about the shared uncertainty of the future amongst friends. Another was about a passing crush on a voice as smooth as long, dark hair and a smile that contrasted so sweetly with untouchable confidence.

None were ever about Jungeun.

And maybe that was because, underneath it all, Jiwoo was also a realist using a vivid imagination and unshakeable optimism to cope with the realities of life. And the reality was that Jiwoo loved a lot of things in life, but she was in love with Jungeun; and Jungeun hated a lot of things in life, but not Jiwoo.

But neither did she love her in the way Jiwoo wished, aloud only once, a whisper of exhausted hope to a clouded night sky. And that was what had Jiwoo looking to each fleeting breeze and blade of grass to see beauty and to make meaning out of it.

Because she knew nothing more beautiful than Jungeun, but there was no meaning in spending a lifetime in love with a song of silence.

So maybe Jiwoo was a romantic.

Maybe because she had to be.

—

They were gathered in Hyunjin’s garage for another regularly spontaneous jam session. For months now, Jiwoo had been saying they would most definitely soon become a real, super awesome, super famous band. After each loud proclamation, Jungeun would snort and roll her eyes, but still reach over for her guitar. Hyunjin would just gaze disinterestedly at them from the ratty couch she only ever allowed herself and her cat Aaongie to lounge on, until she was forcibly dragged to sit behind her drum set.

Today was much the same routine.

“We’re gonna blow up on Soundcloud, and then it’s just a matter of time before we’re touring worldwide!”

“We don’t even have a band name,” Jungeun pointed out, always quick to try and bring Jiwoo back down to reality.

“Meow,” Aaongie agreed. Hyunjin pat his head proudly.

Jiwoo spun on one fluffy-socked heel, hands on hips, to stick her tongue out at the other two. Three. Aaongie glared up at her.

“You know, that’s only ‘cause you keep shooting down my ideas!” Jiwoo scowled, at least, as well as she could. Jungeun once offhandedly said that her attempts at being mean made her look like a cute puppy learning to bark. Jiwoo let herself believe the redness on her cheeks had been a result of indignation, not something else.

“I mean, ‘Threedom’? Really?” Jungeun deadpanned.

“There’s three of us! It’s clever!”

“Better than ‘Hyunjungwoo Crew’,” Hyunjin muttered in her usual loftily serene tone.

“It rhymes -- ”

“Or ‘Odd Eye Circle’.” Jungeun shivered in disgust. “No idea how she came up with that one.”

Jiwoo stomped across the cold concrete floor and snatched up one of Hyunjin’s many loose drumsticks from where it peeked out underneath a beanbag chair that had long lost its comfortableness.

Jiwoo shook the drumstick threateningly at both of the girls in turn. “I don’t see either of you coming up with anything better!”

Hyunjin jumped up from the couch, Aaongie close behind. Towering over Jiwoo, she easily plucked the drumstick from her hand and moved to the stool seat behind her drumset. Jiwoo huffed. Jungeun snickered.

“That was one of the fucksticks.” Hyunjin turned the stick around to show the label messily carved into its lower portion; it had been an inside joke derived from a verbal slip-up, but the pair of drumsticks were the only ones that hadn’t yet broken from overuse over the years, and Hyunjin now treated them like a sort of good luck charm.

As expected, Jungeun rolled her eyes. “And no one touches the fucksticks but you. We know. You know, that name could really be taken the wrong way one of these days—”

“And anyway, all the cool names are taken already,” Hyunjin interrupted, bringing them back to the current argument. She tapped a quick rhythm onto the wall behind her, where a large, pristinely maintained poster was taped. “Like _Escaping Eden_? Alliteration, but not try-hardy. Short and sweet. Possible Biblical allusion to metaphorize a common human struggle for those who don’t conform to the safe mainstream…”

“And they’re hot girls,” Jiwoo added, a bit sarcastically, as she was still miffed that her brilliant band name ideas were always shot down by the other two. As such, she missed the way Jungeun stiffened across the garage at her words, guitar barely in her grasp. “Yes, Hyunjinnie, we’ve all heard Heejin fangirl over them. I can’t believe she converted you into a hardcore Escaping Eden stan.”

“We don’t know if they’re hot girls or not! They only ever show Yves. Their music’s just good, okay?” Hyunjin defended herself with an emphatic tap on the poster, and then a yelp and a careful pat on the place she had just hit.

Jiwoo couldn’t argue with that, though. Escaping Eden, a mysterious band of four, rose to quick fame after one of their song covers went viral. Leaning towards an indietronica sound, their self-composed music wasn’t played much on radio pop stations, but many people were still inclined to search up the source of such heartfelt vocals and delicious guitar riffs. Thus, they discovered Yves, Soul, Jo, and Choerry; four young Korean women with a penchant for sad lyrics, and the talent to share them with the world.

She had to admit, she had had a teeny-tiny passing celebrity crush on Yves. But who didn’t? She was pretty and talented. She was the only one out of the four with public social media, and it was she who was pictured in the edgy album-cover-turned-poster on Hyunjin’s wall. The other three stayed in the shadows. Why, she couldn’t imagine.

“They’re going on tour soon, though,” Jungeun said quietly, almost as if she was thinking aloud to herself. Jiwoo had always found Jungeun’s silent ambivalence towards Escaping Eden confusing. As her best friend and bandmate, it was her duty to text her all of the good music that she stumbled upon via unassuming YouTube links, and Jungeun did the same with her, albeit with a few “never gonna give you up”s and “some of y’all ‘bout to be real mad at me”s hidden between real recommendations. That, and Jungeun was almost never ambivalent. She either hated something, or she loved it, no matter if that opinion switched in the span of an hour.

So when Jiwoo had sent one of Escaping Eden’s songs to her (with the attached message reading “omggggg jungie listen to this!!!!!!! it’s super emo but like a good emo and theyre a korean girl band apparently??? they write english songs but do korean covers we love bilingual queens?????? [hearteye emoji] [fist emoji] [sweat droplets emoji] when will we ever”) and received no reply, she figured Escaping Eden just wasn’t to Jungeun’s taste.

But then Heejin had effortlessly stitched her way into Hyunjin’s, and thus Jiwoo’s and Jungeun’s lives, and when she had slapped that poster up on the wall complaining about stale interior decorating, Jungeun had absentmindedly began humming one of their lesser known songs.

“Heejin’s been stuck to her computer waiting for tickets to come on sale. When will she pay attention to us again?” Hyunjin stared sadly down at Aaongie, who merely returned her gaze with a neutral look of his own.

“Let’s play already,” Jungeun said. She plucked at her guitar strings exaggeratedly. Jiwoo winced at how out of tune they were.

“What are we doing today?” Hyunjin asked, voice nearly monotone. “The usual, or will we finally drop an album on SoundCloud under ‘Unnamed Band’?”

Jiwoo looked to Jungeun. She had her lips pursed, stifling a retort, no doubt. They still looked soft, even when curled in a sarcastic remark.

Jiwoo tore her gaze away before it could be deemed too long a glance, but her eyes locked with Hyunjin’s, and she looked at her with something too unlike suspicion and too close to sympathy for comfort.

“Let’s just jam,” decided Jungeun, oblivious to the silent looks. “If there’s time before we have to leave, we can share lyrics again.”

Jiwoo bounded over to the keyboard propped up against an abandoned storage shelf, excitement at making music overshadowing the unease she felt in her gut.

Hyunjin sighed and twirled the lucky drumstick in her hand with practiced ease. “The usual it is.”

Jiwoo vowed not to slip and look at Jungeun longer than she had to. It was easier, with a loud harmony beneath her fingers and a giggle at forgotten throwback pop song lyrics in her throat.

That was until Heejin burst into the garage from the door that led deeper inside Hyunjin’s house, open laptop swinging precariously in her hands, screaming, “I got us tickets to Escaping Eden!”

Jiwoo then stared, confused, at Jungeun, because she continued to strum an incredibly incorrect chord on the tuned guitar, her eyes darting between Heejin’s laptop and the poster on the wall. She looked neither excited nor disgusted. In fact, she looked a bit sick, like Jiwoo sometimes used to feel when she performed classical pieces in front of parent audiences and got stage fright.

“Jungeun, that is not a C sharp minor,” Hyunjin pointed out after Heejin had calmed down a bit.

Jungeun snapped out of it immediately. “Why don’t you stick to hitting things with sticks.”

“I quit this band,” Hyunjin said, but began tapping a quiet beat with the foot pedal and the snare.

Jungeun stuck her tongue out at her.

Jiwoo messed up her next chord too.

—

Jiwoo knew a couple of languages, but music was by far her favourite.

To think that something as common as vibrations through the air could be focused down and crafted just right into a phenomenon that could induce major chemical responses in the brain?

To think that music used this idea in order to express beauty and harmony and emotion in ways that regular language could never? Jiwoo loved it.

In music theory, the term “octave equivalence” is a fancy way to explain the idea that pitches can be the exact same and indeed sound incredibly similar, differing only in how many octave intervals lie between them. Which means that a note, say a B flat, can be a whistle tone sung by Mariah Carey, or it can be a low pluck of a double bass string; it can be as high or as low as you want, but it is still a B flat.

Jiwoo and Jungeun were octave equivalences.

Best friends since childhood, there was little that they did not share. They liked the same kinds of food and clothes; they were equally competitive when it came to sports and silly dares; they were both forced to learn music by overambitious parents at a young age but grew to love it on their own.

They even both liked girls, which was only shared because Jungeun and Jiwoo had been the most distant they had ever been one year and Jiwoo thought well, she used to be able to come over to Jungeun’s whenever she wanted, so why should that have changed with a few new friends and a couple of sparse text messages? So she went over on a whim one evening and walked in on Jungeun kissing another girl. She didn’t catch a good look at her aside from noting brown locks and fair skin and how good Jungeun looked with reddened cheeks and disheveled hair, before she bolted.

Jiwoo eventually sought Jungeun out, because she knew the other would hide away if not confronted. And the resultant curiosity that burned within her was scalding in a way that she hadn’t expected, and didn’t really want to accept.

“Her name’s Jinsol. Doesn’t go to our school. Jiwoo, I…”

“It’s okay. I think girls are hot too!”

She had been her cheery self, they had embraced in a fit of tears, and that was that. They started to hang out at Hyunjin’s house instead of showing up unannounced at each other’s.

If there were different reasons behind their tears, neither of them shared.

Jiwoo just knew that, a few months later, when Jungeun came to her in tears again, unable or unwilling to explain why Jinsol had left her, and Jiwoo had to physically restrain herself from kissing Jungeun’s forehead while she sobbed in her arms, that they really were octave equivalent:

They were both in love with someone they couldn’t have.

—

It was times like these when Jiwoo really liked spoken language, because sometimes Jungeun’s stony facade bent and she rambled and it was cute.

“I couldn’t sleep last night and I remembered how you were going on and on about those stupid green tea croissant donuts so I googled how to make them and you have to eat it because this is your fault.” Jungeun thrust a baggie at Jiwoo’s face. The tips of her ears were red, and Jiwoo had to forcibly remind herself that Jungeun couldn’t sleep last night for a reason, and that reason was not her.

It was the day of the concert.

The weeks leading up to it had been a headache for her friends and a slowly burning hole in Heejin’s wallet (“How can she not know if she wants to go or not? I need to know if I should sell her ticket to my friend’s friend for 78% of the original price!”), so much so that Hyunjin had taken down the poster, carefully rolled it up, and smacked Jungeun upside the head with it.

“Are you going, yes or no?” Hyunjin glared. “If you say no, I’m quitting the band.”

Jiwoo hadn’t realized she had been playing the melody of one of Escaping Eden’s songs. She did when Jungeun looked over at her with an odd grimace. She slammed her hands down on the keys on instinct, almost toppling the baggie of baked goods over. Aaongie meowed at her in disgust from his perch on the couch. She narrowed her eyes at him, and missed the way Jungeun looked at her, conflicted.

“Jiwoo, you’re going, right?” Jungeun’s voice was small, almost hopeful.

“Of course!” Jiwoo was too quick to reassure her, voice cracking at the end. She scrambled to recover at Hyunjin’s arched eyebrow. “Wouldn’t want to miss seeing Yves live!”

“Fine, I’ll go,” Jungeun said, and Jiwoo had time to only briefly wonder once again why her best friend was so conflicted over this decision and if the flash of a regretful look in her eyes was because she had agreed or because she knew Jiwoo wasn’t sharing something.

Briefly, because Heejin started screaming about Twitter captures of shaky fancams from the opening concerts of Escaping Eden’s first tour, and everyone except for Jungeun gathered around to stare at her laptop screen.

“Oh wow, they’re all super pretty!”

“You can’t even see them from this.”

“Does she have purple hair?!”

“Don’t,” Jungeun started, and cut herself off. The room fell silent, save for staticy screams from the video on Heejin’s laptop, which soon gave way to Soul’s crooning voice and a hushed collective exclamation of awe from the audience.

Jiwoo extracted herself from Heejin’s confused grip on her arm and moved away to her keyboard. “Yeah guys, we don’t want to spoil it for ourselves. We get to see it live!”

Heejin recovered from her bewilderment and slammed the laptop shut, obviously agreeing to the sentiment. “You’re so right! And we get to go to the meet and greet after the show! I get to see Jo face to face!”

“You couldn’t even see her face there,” Hyunjin grumbled. “She could be ugly. My face is right here. It’s a nice face.”

Heejin laughed, light and happy. Jiwoo could write a song about that kind of weightless joy.

“Yes, your face is very nice, Hyun’.”

Both Jiwoo and Jungeun looked away from the other two. Jiwoo accidentally met Jungeun’s gaze, and Jungeun gave her a small, grateful smile.

The redness on Jiwoo’s face was nothing more than a byproduct of second-hand embarrassment from Hyunjin and Heejin. It had nothing to do with a red-stained soul leaving its handprint on her pulse.

She took a bite much too big out of the homemade green tea croissant donut. She really needed to come up with better lyrics.

—

The thing about the Korean language is that there are no articles. No “the” to distinguish a certain object from just “an” object. Context is usually more than enough to denote the difference. This leaves the speaker with an obligation to interpret the sentences they hear, however, with no definite rule to what the difference was between “a song” and “the song”, or “a friend” and “the love of her life”. Or something like that. Jiwoo didn’t know. English was stupid. Korean was more roundabout. Jiwoo could live in those unfilled gaps of meaning between subjects and particles. English, she decided, was reserved for people with names like “Soul”.

All of the songs at the concert were in English.

Not that she hadn’t been expecting that. She was just partial to their acoustic covers of popular Korean songs, and since Jungeun tended to go deaf when their more popular original songs were played, Jiwoo had become accustomed to listening to a YouTube playlist of their Korean covers on repeat.

“Thank you Yves for that… fiery performance,” Jo teased into her microphone about half an hour in, and Jiwoo screamed along with the crowd because hey, Yves was hot and incredibly good at hyping up the crowd even with a bass guitar strapped around her neck.

“My pleasure.” Their seats were close enough that Jiwoo caught the wink that Yves sent Jo’s way, and the reactionary stutter in Jo’s suave demeanor. She screamed again along with a couple of playful wolf whistles from the audience. Jungeun shot her an unreadable look from the seat immediately next to her, but it was probably just one that begged her to keep her high-pitched shrieks to herself; her expression had been unreadable since they approached the venue.

“But I’m going to tone things down a couple notches, if that’s okay with you guys?” Jo continued. The crowd roared with approval. They knew that one of the more angsty pieces featuring Jo’s amazingly feathery yet powerful voice was coming up. Jo beamed, until the lights changed, and she stood in an all white, flowing dress wearing an expression Jiwoo knew to be heartache.

She was moved to tears, and then screaming approval when Choerry began inching into a beat on the glinting drumset in the back that sounded suspiciously like the opening rhythm to their most popular title song. She clutched at Jungeun’s arm in excitement. She chanced a glance at her face, and missed the beat drop because what she saw made her falter.

Jungeun’s eyes were locked on stage, following the movement of one of the girls, looking hopelessly lost and beautifully yearning. Jungeun’s body was completely stiff. She and Jiwoo were probably the only ones there standing absolutely still.

Jiwoo hoped that that was what drew the attention from one of the four.

Because she was a romantic, and maybe she loved those cliche moments in movies when the main character locks eyes with their love interest and everything else fades away simply because the two were destined to be and everything else around them must respect that rule of the universe.

She just never fully understood how awful it could be to realize that she was simply one of the audience.

She saw Soul look up from her keyboard and watched her attention drift almost naturally towards them.

So focused had she been on the sweat on her clammy palms when she had held Jungeun’s hand and guided her to their seats, so intent on shouting all of the lyrics she knew, that she hadn’t really looked at fair skin and flushed cheeks and hair that, although now blonde, were altogether sickeningly familiar.

They sang in English.

Soul was an English name.

Jinsol locked eyes with Jungeun, and everything else faded away.

To close their next set, Jinsol sang, _“wait for me, I’m sorry,”_ in a song that was supposed to be in English.

Korean was stupid.

Something that English speakers lack, luckily for them, are honorifics. The addition of “ _-ssi_ ” to a name is a polite way of addressing someone you don’t know, or are meeting for the first time, or want to keep at a distance.

So Jiwoo knew why Jungeun visibly flinched, as if words spoken aloud could be knives, as if bright soundwaves could physically hurt, when Jungeun from a band without a name whispered _“Jinsol,”_ and Soul from Escaping Eden smiled brightly down at her and greeted her with: _“Hello, Jungeun-ssi!”_

What Jiwoo didn’t understand, then, was why Jungeun stayed back after the meet-and-greet ended, leaving Jiwoo with not so much as a glance, heading backstage after Soul’s smile that only then began to falter. Jungeun wasn’t stopped, though. Jiwoo watched until the doors shut behind them, and her ears strained to make out any yelling or crying or laughter, or anything at all. Another figure, black leather jacket draped over her arm, stepped in front of where Jiwoo’s eyes were trained. To her surprise and slight confusion, the beautiful Yves looked back at her with tired eyes. She looked her up and down for a moment before tossing her jacket right at Jiwoo’s head. Jiwoo caught it, bewildered, after it slid down her face, and clutched the rough material between her fingers.

“It’s cold outside,” was all Yves said. She smiled at Jiwoo before turning and exiting, but it was such a different expression from her normal flirty-confident-album-cover look, that Jiwoo simply let herself be tugged away by Heejin and Hyunjin as she realized that romanticization was scary because it only concealed other things under a prettier light.

Kind of like music.

—

Jiwoo encouraged Heejin and Hyunjin to go home. It had been an hour after the meet-and-greet officially ended. She was determined to wait for Jungeun.

“So the usual,” Hyunjin muttered. Jiwoo wasn’t Jungeun, so she didn’t respond to the provocation.

“You both deserve better than this, you know that,” Hyunjin tried again.

What was better than music? Better than cruelly crushing lyrics and carefree chord progressions? Better than a heart that beat at a steady tempo, in empathy with the pulse of another parallel rhythm?

Hyunjin poked her chest with the rolled up Escaping Eden poster. Jiwoo finally looked at her insead of the building exit.

“I’m only going to say this once, Jiwoo, and then I won’t say anything to you again. I care about you. You’re a good friend, and an even better person. Jungeun is not a good friend to you. You deserve better than this pining, both of you, because I love her too even though I think she sucks.”

Jiwoo felt her lungs constrict, not used to having her feelings so dangerously close to being spoken aloud.

“And Choerry signed this poster, so I’m putting it up in Heejin’s room. Don’t come around to my place. I won’t be there.” Hyunjin’s words were more of a warning, a thinly veiled threat for Jiwoo to sort her shit out before she came back to their next spontaneous jam session acting like Jungeun wasn’t breaking her heart. She poked her with the poster one last time, right over where her heart throbbed, before hooking Heejin’s arm in hers and leading them away.

Yves’ jacket smelled like sweat and old leather.

It was just a little big on her. Comfortable. It didn’t help with the cold, though.

That was how Jungeun found her thirty minutes later, huddled in Soul’s bandmate’s jacket in the empty parking lot of the concert venue.

Jiwoo couldn’t bring herself to hear what lack of explanation she would give, much less look for red, swollen eyes or maybe angry, purple marks on her neck. She waited for Jungeun to start walking, so she could follow. But Jungeun remained in front of her, body coming closer when Jiwoo didn’t respond.

“Jiwoo,” she was saying, and she was so close now that Jiwoo had to listen, “Jiwoo, why are you waiting for me?”

Jiwoo loved to sing. She was loud, and infamous for it. Her voice was strong and stable and she prided herself on it once, when she was younger and “the” best friend was just “a” best friend and she really believed for herself that she could make music and share her feelings with everyone who wanted to hear.

But now, right now, Jiwoo’s voice was as small as she felt in a universe too big and cold to romanticize.

“Yves gave me her jacket,” she said.

“Jiwoo,” Jungeun said, breath so close it would hit Jiwoo’s lips if she was looking up. _“Why?”_

“It smells nice,” Jiwoo said, voice even smaller.

 _“Jiwoo,”_ Jungeun repeated, and if Jiwoo weren’t so focused on the sound of her own heart pounding against the inside of her ribcage, she might have heard something akin to heartbreak in her voice.

As it was, she only heard her own heartbeat as Jungeun lifted her chin and kissed her.

—

She heard heartbreak soon after.

She finally brought herself to look at Jungeun after gentle lips, as soft as she had forever imagined, pulled back.

The angry, purple marks on Jungeun’s neck were obvious, even in the dark night air, even through Jiwoo’s blurred vision as her eyes filled with tears.

“I’m sorry,” Jungeun said, and her eyes might have been red and swollen after all. “I’m so sorry.”

And yet Jiwoo waited.

Waited for Jungeun to start home, so she could follow.

—

Jiwoo thought of it in terms of music.

Sometimes in a piece, there is a note that does not follow the rules set by the key signature at the beginning. It might be an odd sharp or a flat or a natural, and is notated as such, but after that short measure is over, the regular rules apply and everything goes back to normal.

However, out of kindness or perhaps a patronizing presumption that the reader of the piece would forget the regular rules, the writer of the piece might add a little mark in the next measure to remind everyone that things are back to normal now.

These are called courtesy accidentals.

Jungeun wrote one in with every interaction she and Jiwoo had after the kiss.

It was exhausting. The kiss kept her up at night, and not in the nice, pretty way in which it might be a precursor to something more. It haunted her dreams along with flashes of blonde hair and giant rooms in which she could shout but no one would hear her. She slept in Yves’ jacket. Not that she expected it to help with anything.

And it didn’t, really, because that was only at night. During the daytime, when she saw Jungeun every day because that was how it had been for years and she didn’t know how to be otherwise, Jungeun’s constant hesitance around her and attempted avoidance stung at a hollow part of her heart.

“Jungie, just forget it happened. I’m fine, you know me.”

And Jungeun had looked too guilty to disagree. Maybe she didn’t know Jiwoo after all.

Trying to forget it happened was like finding the melodic minor scale complement to a major scale. In order to do so, you have to lower a few tones here and there, and you lose the delicious tension in the half step between the seventh tone and the last one, which is what makes a scale sound finished and nicely wrapped up like a gift (here, have a present, it’s what you deserve after clutching onto the past and whiling away in dreams of the future). But then you weigh the cost of losing that tension: Do you shift the other tones, the other parts of your scale, to keep it as normal as it can be without the tension? Did you even want to get rid of the tension?

The days started to dovetail. They felt like ties marking noteheads together, the same droll tone over and over again, like giving the same bright smiles and loud singing that pretended that everything was normal, but felt impossibly shallow.

It felt like dropping the beat— not the EDM kind, but the kind when you’re trying to transcribe music and the time doesn’t add up and you can’t figure out why or where or how to go on so you’re stuck and stuck and you can’t listen to music the same way anymore and the black and white keys on the keyboard look so cold and lifeless and—

She wrote hours worth of songs. She wrote in all of the languages she knew and came up with as many metaphors as she could for how she felt, and when she was done, she tore up each page. She cried.

She cried so hard she heaved up nothing when she tried to forget how nice her lips had felt on hers, how she had, in that one horribly, wonderfully blissful instance, stopped searching for words to cover up what she felt.

That was how Hyunjin found her.

—

They had another jam session in Hyunjin’s garage.

It was the usual routine, a few cover songs to begin, and a brief argument over the name of their soon-to-be band to fill the lull. And then they started getting into potential original pieces for the band, and sharing lyrics, and Jiwoo had nothing anymore.

She smiled like everything was normal, and she thought that maybe this aching hurt deep in her bones and soul was the new normal. Jungeun smiled back at her. It looked like she felt that things were back to normal, too. The marks on her neck were long gone, and it took hardly any effort now for Jiwoo to avert her eyes from Jungeun when she needed to.

And then Hyunjin’s monotonous plodding of the kick drum faltered. She missed a crash on the cymbals. Jiwoo knew she was staring at her. It was easy for her to avoid looking at Hyunjin, too. It had become easy to avoid looking, to avoid hearing.

“I can’t do this anymore. Fuck this. I’m done.”

“When are you not?” Jungeun’s voice was inadvertently icy in the tension that Jiwoo realized, with an exhausted shudder, had never gone away. What should have been a typical repartee became a hollow insult. Hyunjin didn’t flinch, instead choosing to pet Aaongie, who stayed on the couch despite the anxious twitch of his tail.

“I mean it this time. I’m done.”

Jiwoo heard Hyunjin’s voice, but it didn’t process in the way that it should have. Instead, her ears took in the bitterness that was thinly veiled inside of Hyunjin’s typical serene tone. Her words had a tightness to them that Jiwoo had never heard from her before. It didn’t change the overall sound much. Jungeun didn’t seem to notice it. But to Jiwoo, it was grating. Everything pounded in her ears, in a way so different from how it had when she and Jungeun had kissed. The contrast was a sucker punch to the gut. She could barely breathe. She thought she might be sick for real this time.

“Sit down, Hyunjin. We’re going to finish this song. Right, Jiwoo?” Or maybe Jungeun had noticed, because while she kept her eyes locked with Jiwoo’s, her own voice had fallen flat. Jiwoo knew she had to respond. It was her turn to mitigate the usual bickering between the other two. She should say something that would have them team up to tease her, or spin a three-sixty on her heel and slam a chord dramatically on her guitar as if she was opening a concert on stage. (Like Soul had done. Continued to do.) She should, but she didn’t think she could take any more of what was supposed to be normal words amongst them, and everything felt more like a curtain drawing closed on an act that wasn’t fit to perform for anyone but themselves. She should, but she couldn’t. Sound was a stranger now.

So Hyunjin spoke instead. And god, Jiwoo wished she could close her inner ear to the painful truth that she so plainly sent into the wavering air between them.

“That. That is exactly why.” She spoke in a low voice to Aaongie, long dark hair obscuring her face, not that either Jiwoo or Jungeun could look at her. “We’re never going to finish this song. We’re never going to actually do anything, because it’s always Jungeun half-assedly making decisions and Jiwoo following along with whatever she says, even when we all know that Jungeun will go back on what she decided a thousand times because she’s scared.”

Jiwoo saw the flash in Jungeun’s eyes, but it didn’t seem like one of anger. It was more fragile than that. Or perhaps there is nothing more fragile than anger, because anger always has an underlying source, and it is carefully built up to hide that fear, or sadness, or something else, but it always shatters into jaded edges.

“I’m not scared—”

“Because she’s scared,” Hyunjin repeated, voice hard and loud and enough to send Aaongie scampering away, and Jiwoo to shoot a shaky hand out and clutch onto Jungeun’s wrist. Maybe it was to prevent Jungeun from fighting and hurting herself. Maybe it was to stop herself from falling over with lack of oxygen. Maybe it was because she wanted to see if it would hurt more than the truth finally spoken. Her eyes locked onto their hands now.

“She’s scared of change, and it’s selfish, because like this she can keep everyone in the same position that she’s in: Undefined, unsure, and going nowhere. She’s had her heart broken. And she thinks that makes it okay. But,” Hyunjin continued to speak to the empty space where Aaongie’s imprint lied, “Jiwoo’s scared, too. She’s gotten used to giving up. It’s pathetic.”

“Don’t,” Jungeun’s voice was hoarse. “Don’t call her pathetic.” Jiwoo wondered if she was looking at her still.

“Jungeun has no right,” Hyunjin shouted, standing violently from the couch. Jiwoo flinched. “She has no right, not when Jiwoo breaks her own damn heart to follow whatever Jungeun does. She’s gotten used to loving without it being returned. And that’s not love, and _it’s not right_.”

Jiwoo could just barely feel the agitated rhythm of Jungeun’s heartbeat in her wrist. Light; fleeting. Not close enough, not teeth on neck, not ear resting on chest. Never close enough. Jiwoo loosened her fingers. Hyunjin snatched a drumstick from where it had been wedged in between the torn and stained couch cushions. She twirled it too fast, agitatedly, between her fingers, as she paced the too-small space between the couch and the drumset.

“Everyone’s scared of change,” she started with a strained whisper, voice rising in volume with each word, “and this is why we’ll never finish that song. And it’s stupid because, because they used to love each other, and they used to have dreams for the sake of having dreams but now they hold onto them for the sake of having another unfulfilled promise and it’s stupid, it’s so stupid, I just can’t do it anymore.”

For a last attempt at normalcy, or maybe just to prove the truth that they all knew but refused to hear, Jungeun shot a retort back, “Then don’t.”

And maybe it was because the tension had to dissipate, like when you compared a major key to its natural minor, or maybe life wasn’t a music metaphor and the scariest anger was the kind that was constructed around love; whichever the case, Hyunjin’s next shout was more shocking than the accompanying bout of violence.

“Grow the fuck up already!”

Jiwoo didn’t even hear the drumstick snap against the wall. Rather, it was as if she could see the rippling sound waves resonate off of the point of impact, and then at the spot on the floor that one of the pieces bounced onto. In this manner, she watched it roll in a feeble semi-circle. It barely caused any ripples when the splintered end tapped to a stop against her foot. The once-humorous, crudely inscribed “fucksticks” now split unevenly down the “i”. The shorter end of the broken stick had disappeared somewhere behind the couch.

It was stupid. It was so stupid, Jiwoo wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all. But her own breaths came back to her as soon as her brain began to process Hyunjin’s ragged breathing that sounded too similar to sobs that Jiwoo stifled sometimes at night when she thought up song lyrics that would never reach Jungeun’s ear.

She dropped Jungeun’s wrist. It fell loosely to the other girl’s side.

She kept her gaze on the floor, even as Heejin opened the house-to-garage door with grim determination.

“Get out,” she said, voice soft, or just so in comparison to Hyunjin’s razorblade tone and cutting sobs.

Jiwoo thought it strange just for a moment that Heejin ordered them as if it was her garage that she was kicking them out of, instead of Hyunjin’s. Just for a moment. She stumbled out of the open sliding door realizing that out of the three of them, it hadn’t been Hyunjin that had had a problem with opening up her home. And that it wasn’t odd for a home to gain a permanent tenant, instead of leasing to someone who was always sleeping at someone else’s place, or, that metaphor didn’t quite make sense, she needed to think of music noteheads and off-kilter time signatures—

She realized that she had ran up the heels of a figure in front of her, and she actually did laugh this time, because to the last, she was still following Jungeun.

And that was that. There was no clever allegory for her situation hidden away in basic music theory.

She was in love with Jungeun, and Jungeun was not in love with her.

And she was scared of change. Scared of hoping, when Jungeun’s sneakers turned and pointed towards her. Scared of hearing the truth, when Jungeun shakily started, “Jiwoo, I—”

So, for the first time, Jiwoo stopped chasing after Jungeun’s shadow.

Before she had to hear another sound, she turned and ran.

**Author's Note:**

> considering making a whole ongoing thing of this with the rest of loona bc im secretly an angsty person and love suffering (like jiwoo?????) but anyway @halfbraincellsharer I told you I would dedicate an entire fucksticks to you didn't I


End file.
